


so what if you catch me where would we land

by thecloserkin (tabacoychanel)



Category: Wizards of Waverly Place
Genre: Experimental Style, F/M, I Love You All, Sibling Incest, this fandom is still a gift, this show was a gift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23583568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabacoychanel/pseuds/thecloserkin
Summary: Justin and Alex's lives unfold like a butterfly in reverse.
Relationships: Alex Russo/Justin Russo
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	so what if you catch me where would we land

**Author's Note:**

> Reposting this old fic to ao3 because these two still own the whole of my heart. The cynic in me could not believe in Jalex+happy ending while the shipper in me would take nothing less, so I went "doh! just write the whole thing backwards."

In twelve years, seven months, three days and twelve hours, Theresa will nudge the door of Justin’s apartment open with her foot, because she needs both hands to support the giant flan she baked for his birthday.

She will nearly drop the flan – and the ceramic plate with it – when she sees Alex groggily propping herself up on her elbows in Justin’s bed. Justin will be nowhere in sight.  
  
Alex will say, “Mom,” and Theresa will not know whether it is an admission, or a plea, or a question. Possibly it will be all of these.  
  
Max will appear in the open doorway, breathless from sprinting up five flights of stairs, and he too will say, “Mom,” and reach for the flan, which is a good idea because Teresa suddenly feels the need to sit down.  
  
Justin will emerge from the bathroom, a towel slung over his hips. His lips will silently form the shape for “Mom,” and this time Theresa will actually drop the plate, and flan will go flying everywhere. Max will calmly crouch down to pluck a piece of it off the carpet and proclaim to the room at large, “Five second rule.” And when he swallows the yellow custard as if nothing at all is amiss, then the penny will finally drop.  
  
“You _knew_ ,” Teresa will hiss at Max. She will look at Justin and Alex, and feel herself shattering into even smaller pieces than the broken plate.  
  
Alex will make an impatient noise in the back of her throat. “I told you Mom and Dad would figure it out eventually."  
  
:::

In twelve years, seven months, three days, eleven hours and fifty-five minutes, Jerry will make Max parallel park the car while Theresa goes up to Justin’s suite. Max will wish he had actually paid attention in driver’s ed. Or that Justin and Alex would, you know, _answer their damn phones_ and tell him how they want to play this. Max hates flying blind. By now he will have texted Justin twice and Alex five times (normally she can’t go twenty minutes without checking her phone). It will be Justin’s twenty-first birthday, and they will doubtless both be hungover, and Max will begin to suspect that circumstances are conspiring to prevent him from eating the flan Theresa made for the occasion. Which is extremely disappointing, because caramel flan is his favorite.

:::

In twelve years, seven months, two days and nineteen hours, Alex will convince Justin to go to the club instead of the symphony. (He’s finally legal and he wants to do boring adult things? As if she would let him.)

“We can go clubbing when _you_ turn twenty-one,” he will protest. “That way we can use our real IDs.”

Alex will pout slightly and say, “What’s wrong with my fake ID? Is the angle bad? Does my face look fat?”

And he will remind her that they shared a bottle of wine at the French restaurant but that’s not the point, can’t he see, the point is that "fun" is Alex's department and he should trust her to handle it. She knows when it’s okay to give his inner dork free rein and when he needs to act like a human being.

"All right," agrees Justin in the tone he uses when he's humoring her. "Then what's my department?"

" _I'm_ your department. Obviously."

:::

In twelve years, six months, twenty-six days, and five minutes, Justin will catch Alex trying to bewitch her physics textbook into giving up the answers to the even questions. Maybe he should be pleased she’s attempting to do the homework at all and not blowing it off like she usually does. He will try to show her how to work through the problem but she will get bored quickly (he can tell because she’s playing with her hair). She will lean forward so that their thighs are touching and cock her head at the precise angle that means _let’s get out of here_ and he will forget what Newton’s Third Law says. Or rather, he will understand it in an entirely new light. Because this is them, this is Justin and Alex; how can anything she does fail to elicit an equal and opposite reaction from him?

:::

In twelve years, six months, twenty-six days and four minutes, Alex will stop paying attention to what Justin is saying because she’s too busy looking at his mouth. It’s a damn fine mouth.

Alex will conclude that the best way to shut Justin up is, as always, to kiss him until he’s breathless. And if making out on the couch will convince him to do her homework for her – well, that’s just a bonus, right?

:::

In eleven years, ten months, and thirteen days, they will bump knees under the dinner table and Justin will not be sure whether it was an accident or whether she’s trying to make him choke on his vegetables so she can conveniently dispose of hers during the ensuing ruckus. Knowing Alex, it will be a little bit of both.

Max will help himself to his third helping of cranberry sauce (Justin knows the face Alex will make before she even makes it) and their mom will boast to Grandma how Justin has made the dean’s list for the fifth semester running. Alex will mouth the words _suck up_ and _show-off_ and _know-it-all_.

:::

In eleven years, nine months, and eighteen days, Justin will look at law schools.

Alex will lie in his bed clutching his pillow to her chest and refuse to get up. “Didn’t we agree we’d start a band?”

“Only if Max wins.”

“We’re not going to let him win on purpose, are we? I mean” – she will hasten to correct herself – “ _I’m_ definitely not going to let him win, since I already kicked both your butts once and I can do it again without breaking a sweat.”

Justin will shoot her a deprecating look, like the thought of deliberately throwing the competition in Max's favor has never even crossed his mind, and Alex will pretend likewise. She will refuse to think about what winning might mean for either of them, or for that matter, what losing might mean.

Because if magic has been part of you since the day you first drew breath, you have no idea who you are without it. You have no idea if Justin will still be Justin and Alex will still be Alex, if JustinandAlex will still exist if (when) the power is no longer thrumming through their veins.

:::

In ten years, eleven months, twelve days and five hours, Max will wake up in the middle of the night with a craving for Rocky Road Sundae. He will find Justin and Alex already in the kitchen. Alex will be standing behind Justin’s chair, her hand resting on his shoulder, and there will be only one bowl of ice cream on the table in front of them.

Max’s eyes will flit between Alex and the ice cream, and an image will rise unbidden into his mind: Alex sitting on Justin’s lap, their heads close together; Alex jumping up quickly when she hears Max’s step on the landing.

Justin will open his mouth but Max will shake his head and shuffle toward the fridge. “Don't, okay? I don’t want to know.”

:::

In ten years, three months, five days, twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes, Justin will say, “Alex.” Nothing more. Just “Alex.” There are a million ways to say her name, and Justin knows them all.

:::

In ten years, three months, five days, twenty-three hours and eleven minutes, he will press her against the wall. Everywhere they touch, her skin is on fire. She does not know if it is possible to die of desire, but if he ever stops touching her she expects she will find out.

:::

In ten years, three months, four days, twelve hours, forty minutes and seven seconds, he will tilt her chin up and kiss her on the lips. They will draw apart, afterward, like they’re waiting to see if one of them wants to wipe their mouth with the back of their hand or something.

Finally Justin will say, “I’ve wanted to do that for awhile.”

Alex will roll her eyes. “Took you long enough, doofus.”

:::

In ten years, three months, four days, twelve hours, and twenty-one minutes, Alex will corner Justin in the library after school. She will be brandishing his acceptance letter to Stanford. So she was going through his stuff, she admits it. And he made it hard enough to find, wedged between the pages of a book on gardening spells. Who does he think he is? What gives him the right to keep this from her?

There will be shouting. Lots of shouting. (They’re not in the library anymore.) He will say, “CUNY was good enough for Dad” and “Mom didn’t go to top-tier school.” (“Mom went to school in _Mexico_.”)

Alex will forget what they’re fighting about. To be honest, she’s not entirely sure why she’s angry with him: Because he intends to attend college half a continent away? Or because he intends to forgo the opportunity (and what reasons could he possibly have for that)? Not that it matters to Alex. Not like she has a history of using magic to create a duplicate of her brother and sending it off to college in his place because she couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving. All she knows is that she learned to fight with Justin before she learned to walk, or talk, or lie convincingly (okay maybe not, maybe she’s a born liar). Alex is supposed to be the selfish impulsive one, and most of the time that works pretty well for her. Yet when it comes to Justin, all of her certainties fall apart. What does it say about Alex that she's never thought so hard about anything in her life, and here she is giving herself the mother of all headaches by worrying about _Justin_? (Of course, one way of looking at it is that Justin is her one constant, the one person she can count on, always: She can’t imagine going a day without tormenting him.)

:::

In ten years, two months, and fourteen days, Justin will see his sister in a bikini and decide that he’s going to hell. It’s not like he’s never seen her in a bathing suit before; if he casts his mind back far enough, to when their mother used to bathe them in the tub together, he's doubtless seen her without a single stitch of--

No, better not. He glances up from his book (what in God’s name possessed him to bring Dante to the beach?) and now she’s talking to a lifeguard, some guy who’s tanned and muscled and _at least_ five years too old for her. Justin will see red. What is _wrong_ with men? Justin will feel an unexpected twinge of sympathy for his father, who jokes about locking Alex up in a tower until she's thirty. _I mean, what's the alternative_? _Take every man who checks out my sister's boobs and launch him into the sun?_ He will flex the fingers of his left hand and imagine punching the pervert of a lifeguard in his ludicrously square jaw.

The lifeguard isn’t even looking at Alex's face. The problem is, neither is Justin.

Yup. Straight to hell.

:::

In nine years, eleven months, and twenty-eight days, Alex will accidentally turn herself and Harper into pizzas. (Harper’s will be topped with marshmallows and kimchi). Justin will turn them back.

“What part of ‘no magic while you’re grounded’ is so hard to understand?”

“Yeah, well you’re grounded too, which means you’re not supposed to do magic either. Except remember how you just did? Like, two minutes ago?”

“Fine. Next time I’ll wait until one of the customers comes over and takes a bite out of you.”

“Ew! Gross.”

“Not to mention it’s your fault we’re grounded in the first place.”

“Hey, that wasn’t – ” she will begin, but then she’ll stop. Because she prides herself on being able to read Justin like an open book (except she would never, you know, read an actual book) and the look on his face right now? Definitely not his _time to use my surfeit of responsibility to lecture Alex to death_ look.

“I just – ” and for some reason he will look pained when he says this, “I won’t always be here to bail you out.”

She will gaze at him out of guileless brown eyes and ask, in all seriousness, “Why not?”

:::

In nine years, one month and twenty-two days, Alex will flick her soda tab in the general direction of the trash can. It will skitter across the floor before it gets there. Harper will take a sip of her Coke while Alex makes a face at hers.

“This is dumb. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, and the tab comes off in five or six twists, tops. How many boys' names start with the first six letters of the alphabet? Who are the rest of us supposed to marry?!”

“Alex,” Harper will remind her gently, “Your boyfriend’s name is Dean.”

:::

In three years, nine months, and eleven days, Justin will come down with the chicken pox. Max, who’s never had it, will be shuffled off to Kelbo’s. (Kelbo’s! What are his parents thinking?) Theresa has never had it either, but Jerry doesn’t have any luck convincing her to leave. (Something about “my house” and “my son” and “my life.”)

He’s not sure, because everything becomes a little woozy at this point, but he thinks he remembers being fed a lot of soup. Also a lot of medicine. It’s hard to tell the difference after a while.

And he knows that sick people are supposed to have vivid dreams or whatever, but he will swear that he remembers Alex being there. Taking his bloated, pockmarked hand in her own small, slim one. Holding on until he falls back into a fitful sleep.

:::

In five minutes, Alex will pitch forward out of the swing and scrape her knees in the sandbox. (How do you scrape your knees in a sandbox? Aren’t those things designed to be kid-proof?)

She will cling to Justin after he helps her up, her tears soaking through his shirt. His brand new Star Wars shirt. He will sigh and wrap an arm around her and they will stagger home. He will wonder why he took her to the playground, when he could have been playing video games with Zeke instead.

Then she will lift her head from where it’s muffled against his chest and smile at him like he’s the best brother in the history of the world. And even though he’s not – even though there are times he would gladly strangle her – it’s also true that he would give up an entire week of video games without a second thought, if it means making her smile like that again.

:::

Right now, Justin will stand behind the swing to push Alex, whose giddy cries of “Higher! Higher!” are punctuated by giggles. And he doesn’t know when or how he got caught up in her elation, when her joy became his joy, but Justin is laughing too. (He's too old for this, he reminds himself. He's only taking Alex to the playground under parental duress.)

Alex’s laughter is infectious. In the end, Alex always gets what she wants.


End file.
